Cloud experts weigh in with 2023 AWS re:Invent predictions
As AWS re:Invent 2023 approaches, our experts predict what announcements will come out of the AWS conference. Read up on this year's predictions ahead of the big day.
For its 12th year, AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas for five days of keynote announcements, over 2,000 sessions, certification opportunities and more. Spanning from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1, attendees have the option to attend the conference in person or to access sessions and keynotes virtually.
Every year, AWS uses the conference to announce new services, emerging technologies, expanding features and more. Last year, these announcements included the company's commitment to becoming the greenest place for enterprises to run their IT and applications, new EC2 instances and expanded integration capabilities.
Our expert contributors think that this year will be no different. Read up on their own predictions for AWS re:Invent 2023.
Editor's note: The following predictions have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris Tozzi
Chris Tozzi, analyst
I expect announcements in a few key areas. An obvious one is generative AI (GenAI). AWS has already unveiled a lot of new offerings and updates in that realm over the past year. I don't think they'll roll out anything earth-shattering, but I'd be surprised if they haven't saved some GenAI product news for re:Invent.
Somewhat relatedly, I suspect they'll announce new bare-metal and/or GPU-enabled EC2 options, since those are in demand thanks to GenAI, among other types of use cases.
Lastly, I can foresee some bolstering of AWS security tools and services. Cybersecurity tooling is arguably an area where AWS and other major public clouds still have a lot of room to grow, and the market appears primed to reward offerings in that area given widespread anxiety about cybersecurity risks.
Paul Nashawaty
Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst, TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group
When I think about AWS, the migration strategies to the cloud come to mind as a top concern for many organizations. As cloud migration becomes more mainstream, more mature organizations will look to leverage the cloud to address the tech stack issues for past heritage application to today's containerized apps using microservices to the future of cloud-native development looking to technologies such as WebAssembly.
I expect AWS to address the distributed cloud challenges -- we see 94% of organizations using two or more clouds. Automation will be taken into consideration to address skill gap issues. Another area of concern is the level of complexity organizations are dealing with and how AWS will address these challenges.
Jon Brown
Jon Brown, senior analyst, TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group
I expect to see announcements and content about the intersection of AI, cloud financial operations management (FinOps) and sustainability.
AWS is the last major cloud provider to officially join the FinOps Foundation, an organization dedicated to increasing the visibility surrounding cloud costs, which includes members from 5,000 companies, including 47 -- now 48, if you include Amazon -- of the Fortune 50. The greatest impact of that membership is support for the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, or FOCUS, model to enable better sharing of actual cloud cost data.
AWS is now joining cloud providers Microsoft, Google and Oracle to provide more standardized billing data, which will help FinOps teams within organizations provide consistent and accurate cost accounting for cloud expenditures.
I'm pleased to see that AWS is being proactive with sessions like "Optimizing generative AI workloads for sustainability" to address the elephant in the room that is AI model resource consumption. As organizations mature, regulations tighten, and climate impact stemming from human activity becomes unignorable; accounting for energy consumption and carbon emissions are gaining in importance. I'm looking for AWS to strengthen its position here, as they're not viewed as favorably as their peers on sustainability -- an increasingly important input to buyers making decisions about where to deploy production workloads.
Ernesto Marquez
Ernesto Marquez, IT architect
I expect significant announcements in the GenAI space in terms of new functionality supported by this technology in AWS. I'm also expecting an expansion of the foundation models available in tools such as Amazon Bedrock.
Serverless is an area that will likely have some important announcements, and I expect some of them related to better pricing and new services or features that would expand the number of use cases where serverless is a good alternative compared to server-based computing.
Johanna McDonald is associate site editor for TechTarget Cloud Computing. McDonald graduated from the University of Vermont in 2021.
